Ongoing notes: Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks: J-T Kelly + Mark Statman,

I’ve been seeing these Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks that Jordan Davis has been producing out of Brooklyn for a while now—see my review of Buck Downs’ GREEDY MAN: selected poems (2023) here and Nada Gordon’s The Swing of Things (2022) here—so I’m pleased to see copies of J-T Kelly’s LIKE NOW (2023) and Mark Statman’s CHICATANAS: SELECTED POEMS (2023) appear at my door.

The chapbook debut by Indianapolis poet and innkeeper J-T Kelly, LIKE NOW, offers an assemblage of short lyric first-person narrative and layered accumulations that sway and play, such as the short poem “Plunder”: “Pomegranate—ripe, / Unbroken— // I, too, hide my heart— / Fruitlessly.” There’s something of a disjointed lyric reminiscent of Canadian poets Stuart Ross, Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick, each composing poems that lean into disconnections, connections and surreal threads and sly humour across the short lyric. I’m curious in how Kelly’s poems form across such narrative disjoints and jumbles, and how these pieces shape themselves not simply through a completed thought run all the way to the end, but one that rests somewhere in the middle, allowing the reader the space through which to complete on their own. I am intrigued by these poems of J-T Kelly.

West

What I said when I was leaving.
Your friends and their boots.
I left it there on the key stand.
The road is dry. But I still think about
standing on the on-ramp outside of Bismarck.
At the mercy of. Sometimes forty-five miles
from a pay phone. I went north because
Zach didn’t listen and had gone south.
He had been picked up and taken to some field.
They tried to set him on fire, but the gasoline
dissolved the adhesive and he broke free.
The wheat so near to harvest must have swayed majestically
as he ran, pain in his eyes, suffocating,
And deciding to finish grad school, which he did.
You, it turns out, consider me to be.
The headlights extend sideways out of the low stalks of winter
    wheat.
The passenger seat holds my fur-lined leather mittens
and your anthology of poetry from The New York school which I
    will not give back.
You can go to hell. I’m going to Seattle.

I hadn’t actually heard of New York-based American writer, poet and translator Mark Statman before seeing this new title, although the acknowledgments of CHICATANAS: SELECTED POEMS offers that he is the author of six poetry collections, two works of prose and has translated collections by Federico García Lorca (with Pablo Medina), José María Hinojosa and Martín Barea Mattos. I’m fascinated by the idea of the chapbook-length selected poems, something Davis has been exploring for some time (there was also the chapbook-length Stuart Ross bilingual Spanish/English ‘selected’ I reviewed recently, published in Argentina), and I would almost think that putting together a chapbook-length selected would be far more challenging than attempting one book-length, even beyond the consideration of weighing the possibility of ‘best’ against potential ‘representative of this author’s work,’ etcetera. I’m curious as to how the poems in this collection might be representative of Statman’s larger canvas of writing, offering first-person lyric musings via hesitation, soft and slow unfolding of narration. There’s a slowness here his lines and breaks require, both firm and thoughtful, never in any particular hurry, because you’ll get there in the end, either way, whether losing a poem through a young woman’s accent (“the disappearance of the poem”) or a piece on the death of Kenneth Koch, that opens the collection, “Kenneth’s Death,” that begins: “he’s dead and / I still don’t believe: / years later / I’m walking someplace / and I’ll think / this is something / I’ll tell him / when he gets back / when he gets back / as though where Kenneth’s gone / is simply too far away / to telephone or / send a postcard [.]”

chicatanas

some mysteries have
to be that way
Alma asked me yesterday
if I was going to
the casita today
was I going to harvest
our chicatanas
giant ants from
whose toasted bodies
legs and heads removed
Alma makes a
sharp spicy salsa
the chicatanas only come out
once a year and every year
since we bought the
casita we’ve had them
they emerge before dawn
the ground wet it’s either
on the 24^th or 25^th of
every June St. John’s Day
I ask Alma
but how do you know
which day 24, 25 and she
smiles and says because
the morning after
the dawn fills with
small white butterflies

 

Jordan Davis, Yeah, No

 

The Apricot

The red and white folded with gray
shadows of the American flat
reflected and beating I the concavity
of the silver orange bowl three seeds
ridged with spikes of here red here
orange dried fruit the spikes like
the edge the edge like the shell
of a crab the damp gray day
left at the isthmus the apricot

The third full-length poetry collection by Brooklyn poet, editor and publisher Jordan Davis, following Million Poems Journal (Faux Press, 2005) and Shell Game (Edge Books, 2018), is Yeah, No (Cheshire MA: MadHat Press, 2023). Whereas I had seen two chapbooks by Davis prior to this—NOISE, which appeared last year through my own above/ground press (full disclosure) and Hidden Poems (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]—this is the first full-length collection of his I’ve seen (although the poems of NOISE do exist within). From the title alone, one can see how Davis revels in the collision of words and meanings, allowing a combination of collision and pivot to form new shapes, utilizing thoughts and phrases that occasionally even seem to run each other through. “Believing me, believe me, be believing me.” he writes, to open the poem “Loud Singing,” “I found the envelope empty. / I did not know I was not supposed to open the envelope.” Long associated with the flarf poets, as his author biography attests, his poems are sensory, rhythmic and gymnastic, simultaneously flippant and dead serious—showcasing elements of the “serious play” that bpNichol often referenced—offering lyrics neither surreal or straightforward but clearly made out of words. “A pirate in a repeat environment / plays tag in the ironing.” the poem “Eleven Forgiven” begins, “Entangle the raiments. / Peeved, tap clogs, / the livery of pillory talk / evangel living as foreign / as the driver of the Rangers’ van.” Davis’ craft is clear through the speed and the ease through which his lines roll; composed as moments, but fractured, fragmented; offered to keep the mind slightly off-balance, guessing. Not merely blending but smashing together political commentary with pop culture, Davis’ poems aim, one might say, not for the “a-ha!” conclusion of traditional lyric, but one of moments altered and alternate, working to see what else might be gathered through how phrases are formed. “Do the easy things first, get some momentum.” he writes, to open the poem “Think Tank Girl,” “It’s a management principle. Also? / You might make sure you’re not poisoning apples / in the sprawl, claiming responsibility / for turning the hillside from smooth dark green / to a grid of pale cubes, an avocado / you’d invent to feed your young. / In a free market they call sneak attacks troubleshooting.”

Ongoing notes: late May, 2023: Emily Tristan Jones, Carolina Ebeid + Jordan Davis,

There’s so much going on! There’s even a reading on Thursday in Ottawa with three above/ground press poets—Stuart Ross, William Vallières and Jessi MacEachern—hosted by Bardia Sinaee. And you saw the big above/ground press 30^th anniversary fundraiser, happening right now? Or the fact that the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair is coming up in a couple of weeks? And don't forget my enormously clever substack, where I'm working on one or two or three ongoing non-fiction projects. So many things!

Montreal QC: I was first directed to Montreal poet and editor/publisher (Columba) Emily Tristan Jones’ chapbook debut, HAND (Cactus Press, 2023) thanks to Hugh Thomas, who offered her as a poet worth paying attention to. I’m intrigued by the curious patterns of her lyric, and intrigued at the fact that she has a full-length debut, Buttercup, out next year with an unnamed press (at least according to her biography in this particular title) in Chicago. “A crow, inserting its hands into the air,” she writes, to open the poem “CROWNLAND,” “descends / by my human head / to low red shrubs [.]” The narratives of her scenes unfold across narratives of straight lines and deflections (the Blomidon and Bay of Fundy references I quite enjoyed, having experienced such myself), even through the fact of a chapbook titled HAND that bears the cover illustration of a foot: one thing is not necessarily another, aiming instead for the ways in which these thoughts connect. The poems are playful, specific and simultaneously tethered and untethered to the ground, akin to a kite. “My whole body, like a skeleton, music in the air,” she writes, early on in the collection. I am interested to see what her work is able to accomplish through this forthcoming debut, across a wider, broader canvas.

~

A large number of my thoughts were broadcast in the woods

I ran in every direction, leaving little to the imagination
I was like a racehorse. The wind whistled behind me
Animals whistled behind me

I was a free man
My soul fanned like the hair on the body of a wild thing

Philadelphia PA: Further to Brian Teare’s remarkable chapbook series through his Albion Books is Carolina Ebeid’s latest, DAUERWUNDER (2023), subtitled “a brief record of facts,” published as the fourth title in Albion’s series eight [see my reviews of 8.1 here, 8.2 here and 8.3 here]. The poems collected here are set, or tethered, between two words—“WINTERNET” and “TRANSGRACE”—and employ a sequence of an exploration around the accidents of language that technology spark. She writes of the glitch, of audio, text and meaning (something east coast poet Lance La Rocque explored as well from a different angle, across his chapbook glitch a few years back), from the literal glitch of audio to the recombinative. She explores the elements of what remains and what is rebuilt, reconstituted; she writes of telepathy, telephone calls and the “Hollow of a torso”; she writes of what is left behind, lost or added, from digital recordings to “something about our / neighborhood dust [.]” As she writes, mid-way through the collection: “how do you know you are remembering / an event or remembering the pictures of / an event, do your dream in the first or / third person?”

“Attention” as an imperative but without exclamations, the way one lowers her voice in the sensitive part of conversation making you lean in. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer” (Simone Weil).

Brooklyn NY: I’m only slowly engaging with the work of New York poet Jordan Davis, having produced a chapbook of his through above/ground press (full disclosure, naturally), and now through the publication of his Hidden Poems (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2022), a small chapbook of sixteen short poems produced in an edition of one hundred copies. I’ve always been a bit envious of those poets working in miniature, from Nelson Ball to Mark Truscott to Cameron Anstee, for the possibilities that can exist in small spaces. Through Davis, the short form is less a compact form of held meaning, as in the works of those three examples, but as poems composed as pieces that exist beyond the boundaries of a single moment. Some poems here are akin to a wave of the hand, suggesting but part of an unseen and far larger space, or as accumulations of phrases that mangle and mix in the imagination, offering something far else. These are poems of possibility, including what might fall into contradiction, across what might otherwise be impossible. His directions are as evident as through the opening poem, that reads, in full:

BAD POEM

Put that rock down

Ongoing notes: late March, 2023: Amanda Earl + Nada Gordon,

I can’t believe you’ve been missing out on our thirteenth annual VERSeFest: you know you can stream each of our events for free, yes? Whether live or archived? There’s so much going on!

Ottawa ON/Montreal QC: From James Hawes’ Turret House Press comes Ottawa poet Amanda Earl’s latest chapbook, Fear of Elevators (2023). Given how much of her past few years have featured heavily on producing visual works, most of which is part of her work-in-progress “The Vispo Bible,” it is good to see Earl still exploring ideas through text as well. Working through her anxieties around elevators, living on the nineteenth floor of a downtown Ottawa apartment building, her introduction to the collection begins: “Fear of Elevators began when the elevators in my building were being repaired and replaced.” Constructed as a collage of prose—essay, fiction, fairy tale, archive, memoir—and poetry, from the narrative lyric to the visual. Earl playfully moves back and forth with ease across fragments and directions, and even offers her own reworking of Robert Frost’s infamous poem “The Road Not Taken” (first published, as I’m sure you know full well, in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic) through her poem, “The Elevator Not Taken.” She manages to echo the cadence and rhythms of Frost’s piece quite well, and the playfulness of this particular poem is rather delightful, as the first half reads: “Two elevators fell and rose in a highrise. / And glad I could not travel both. / And be one traveler, long I stood. / And looked up at once as high as I could. / To where it lurked on the top floor. / Then took the other, as just as dangerous. / But having perhaps the more expedient claim, / because it had arrived and I had to pee. / Though as for that elevator passing / there was a worn down as the other, / really about the same.”

There is something curious about the way Earl utilizes collage for this particular item, furthering a structure she’s been employing for a while now, simultaneously pencilling a through-line across what might be seen as a scattershot of layered sections, one on top of each other. The effect is interesting, and one she’s explored for some time, with varying degrees of success. It is interesting to see her expand the possibilities of chapbook-length structure; might this be something eventually book-length as well?

In the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo, Japan there have been 32 accidents involving the revolving door since the building’s opening in April. A six year old boy was killed. Seven people became stuck in the revolving doors & three had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance for treatment after suffering serious injuries. The company also said 20 accidents have occurred involving smaller, hand-pushed revolving doors. The sensor doesn’t activate at first & the door continues to revolve for at least 25 centimetres. Mori Building is Japan’s biggest private developer. Sanwa shutter fell 14 yen, or 2.2 percent to 619, on Friday.

Evil revolving door tries to kill clueless innocent people! Looks like someone tries to enter the wrong way from the left? Is this a hit and run? Or is the wind blowing too fast? The glass shattered perfectly fine, like safety glass is supposed to: Instead of large dangerous pieces of glass which could kill, safety glass breaks into tiny pieces which won’t do as much damage.

Brooklyn NY: For a while now, Brooklyn poet Jordan Davis has been producing chapbook-length volumes of selected poems, one of the latest is by Brooklyn-based American poet Nada Gordon, her The Swing of Things (Subpress, 2022). This is the first of Gordon’s works I’ve encountered, so I’m unaware of the larger scope or scale of her work, so this “remix” is a curious introduction, and one reminiscent of how Phil Hall reworked selected scraps to assemble his own critical “selected poem,” Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015) [see my write-up on such here]. The chapbook-length poem “The Swing of Things” is structured through untitled sections (as well as an array of photographs, some of which suggest their own collage-works), short bursts that exist across each page; some of which group, or even cluster, allowing for its own kind of collage-work possibility. Her visuals and text both suggest the familiar but one that is twisted, turned and shaped into what is unerringly new, and some of which is just enough to unsettle, question or even simply wonder. Gordon’s poems hold a delightful heft, subtle in its play and dark corners, writing from both the shadow and the sudden light.

I believe in meerkats –
Where’re you from, you long skinny
curious dark-eyed thing?

 

If I fall into the hole of this poem
will you pull me out?
It’s a hairy catastrophe,

 

like putting HOT PINK PAINT
on an apocalyptic feeling, stinking a little
of the would-be sublime